We’re pretty happy with the response overall. But there is one change I’d like to discuss with you guys: THE WHEEL.

Who am I?

I’m Brad Wardell. I wrote the original GalCiv for OS/2 and much of GalCiv I and GalCiv II. I also designed those games and wrote their AIs. On GalCiv III I’ve been more of an executive consultant thus far as I’ve been focusing on Ashes of the Singularity for the past couple of years. But GalCiv remains my baby. I’ve spent over 20 years with it. So it matters a lot to me.

Background

In GalCiv III 1.0 through 1.3 players could go to the planetary governor and override the global spending priorities on a planetary basis. This made micro-managers very happy and people who don’t like to micro manage very sad.

Planetary Wheel: Love & Hate

I am in the camp of hating it. HATING it. Not because of the micromanagement because it completely violates what GalCiv has always been about: You are running a galactic civilization. It’s supposed to be half simulation, half strategy game. The wheel is totally gamey. No civilization functions where last being can be assigned a job by the government.

I have tried to stay reasonably hands off on GalCiv III but the planetary wheel had to go. I wanted it out for 1.1, then 1.2, then 1.3 but other things took priority and it was finally killed in 1.4.

It has NOTHING to do with the AI

I read the forums and I see people talking about the change being made to make the AI easier. That’s a ridiculous argument. Not to be mean but only a non-programmer would say that. Micro-managing is what AIs do best. I could write up an AI that could tweak planetary wheels every turn to a level that would make most micro managers weep.

Put another way: computers are faster and better at math than humans and the planetary wheel was all about math.

The reason the AI didn’t use the planetary wheel in previous versions is because it was supposed to be eliminated long ago. So there was no point writing AI for this if the feature was going to go away.

It is my game but it is also YOUR game

Now, that said, I write games for you guys. That’s what motivates me. I see people who really liked the planetary wheel. So we need some sort of solution that will make both groups happy.

What I’m going to ask is that a prefs.ini setting called planetarywheel=on be added. If that’s on, you’ll get your wheel. However, that won’t be the official version of the game. There will be no in-game UI option to turn it on. People who are passionate about this feature can still turn it on without everyone else feeling like they have to use this feature in order to micro-manage their empire to the nth degree.

I know that solution won’t make everyone happy. No solution will. But hopefully this will be a reasonable compromise for most people.

Frogboy, I personally like the wheel and use it. I also agree with making the AI optimize it to its benefit as a way to improve its capability rather than getting big bonuses. As I understand it, the main thing you seem to have a problem with is the ability to create situations where an unrealistic amount of research or production can be obtained using it. In that case I would say fix that, not remove the wheel. Removing the wheel would seem to be a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Why can't some limiting factors be added. For example, use the concept that rarely doubling anything gives you twice as much. There is always some amount of inefficiency. So make 50 percent not be twice 25 and 100 not be twice 50. Add diminishing returns to the system.

I am a big fan of the wheel. so naturally i felt very disappointed once it has been removed.

on the same time I understand the reasons for the removal.

Yet I BEG you PLEASE for the sake of thousands of game fans give us back production wheel and social/military slider. do not limit it to certain race! Keep both! Keep new system of tick boxes for simplified production allocation and bring back the "wheel".

I believe there is another ways how to sort out problem of super specialized super powerful planets.

Just change the way base points calculated.

Here we had a conversation of adding things like cohesion and penalty to morale for overusing wheel.

I have another idea in mind. and I can translate that idea in very simple mathematical formula. √γ×2÷10=χ

first i would like to transform 100% of production on the wheel into 10 notional points. so basically every 1% of production you allocate on the wheel gives you 0.1 notional point.

than we add extra formula √γ×2÷10=χ

where is "γ" notional points

x- production efficiency modifier

this formula gives us parabolic curve of production efficiency

we know base production point derives from population and other modifiers like morale, capital planet, so on.

we see that having more balanced approach turn 20 base points into 21.52 actual points

compare it to 13.33 actual point with full 100% specialization.

On top of this developers can add some kind of "balanced economy modifier" (let's say gives extra 20% to actual production points ) which triggered when there is no more than 50% or 60% of base production points on the wheel is allocated to any direction.

Yet I BEG you PLEASE for the sake of thousands of game fans give us back production wheel and social/military slider. do not limit it to certain race! Keep both! Keep new system of tick boxes for simplified production allocation and bring back the "wheel".

The purpose of the change was not just to "simplify" things but to remove a burdensome game element that very few players used and even fewer actually liked. It was cool at first, but after months of playing it became a mindless chore rather than an interesting feature, and I am glad to see it gone.

Have you read my Ai. post on Joe user forums I would like your input. The galciv equivalent to this is probably where the computer averages what you do for so many turns per turn per game. Not to hold against you, but to dictate on how it plays against you. Game two had a nice civilization screen, and espionage for helping it to do this if the programmers decided to implement this.

Yet I BEG you PLEASE for the sake of thousands of game fans give us back production wheel and social/military slider. do not limit it to certain race! Keep both! Keep new system of tick boxes for simplified production allocation and bring back the "wheel".

The purpose of the change was not just to "simplify" things but to remove a burdensome game element that very few players used and even fewer actually liked. It was cool at first, but after months of playing it became a mindless chore rather than an interesting feature, and I am glad to see it gone.

do not like it? do not use it. if you do not like it - it's not a reason the remove it! JUST DO NOT USE IT! old game of master of orion got more options to control.

Yet I BEG you PLEASE for the sake of thousands of game fans give us back production wheel and social/military slider. do not limit it to certain race! Keep both! Keep new system of tick boxes for simplified production allocation and bring back the "wheel".

The purpose of the change was not just to "simplify" things but to remove a burdensome game element that very few players used and even fewer actually liked. It was cool at first, but after months of playing it became a mindless chore rather than an interesting feature, and I am glad to see it gone.

I have to disagree. I feel like most just never bothered to give it a chance. They looked at how all the numbers changed when they start sliding things around, got overwhelmed, and just gave up. Mastery of the wheel is actually as simple as using the radio buttons. Most of the time, you are only going to be swinging it somewhere between two focuses, and you do not even need to be precise with numbers and percentages since excess manf gets wasted. Furthermore, there is no need to swing it every turn or even every few turns. Even min/maxing does not require checking up every few turns, unless you just wanted to squeeze out every last digit of production, but that is pointless anyway.

The argument against the wheel being too powerful is understandable, but I will personally never agree with the wheel being too much of a chore.

Yet I BEG you PLEASE for the sake of thousands of game fans give us back production wheel and social/military slider. do not limit it to certain race! Keep both! Keep new system of tick boxes for simplified production allocation and bring back the "wheel".

The purpose of the change was not just to "simplify" things but to remove a burdensome game element that very few players used and even fewer actually liked. It was cool at first, but after months of playing it became a mindless chore rather than an interesting feature, and I am glad to see it gone.

I have to disagree. I feel like most just never bothered to give it a chance. They looked at how all the numbers changed when they start sliding things around, got overwhelmed, and just gave up. Mastery of the wheel is actually as simple as using the radio buttons. Most of the time, you are only going to be swinging it somewhere between two focuses, and you do not even need to be precise with numbers and percentages since excess manf gets wasted. Furthermore, there is no need to swing it every turn or even every few turns. Even min/maxing does not require checking up every few turns, unless you just wanted to squeeze out every last digit of production, but that is pointless anyway.

The argument against the wheel being too powerful is understandable, but I will personally never agree with the wheel being too much of a chore.

you are absolutely right. it take as much time to click on the wheel as it takes to click on one of tick boxes. everybody who argues that wheel is time consuming- talking nonsense! and just playing fools! the wheel is too powerful is true but this issue can be easily sorted. there are a lot of way to sort it out with out need of removing it. one of the ways suggested by frogman - adding cohesion. another - just changing the way base points calculated. i have suggested one of the possible ways how it can be done few posts before.

You folks who want the wheel fail to realize that it was never intended to stay. This entire thread and all the threads to keep it are moot. Stardock has 'put it back in' and will actually re incorporate it back in 1.5.

Personally, as someone who has used it since Alpha, I find the game far more fluid and enjoyable without it.

I was one who used it to crush the ai and with it in game it was very easy to do. I challenge all of you 'wheel lovers' to play an entire game WITHOUT it and see if you can beat the ai as easy as you can with the wheel. Step up to Gifted or Genius and note that you can no longer zip WAY ahead of the ai in production or research or money. All three have to be planned out especially when settling a planet. You have to decide am i going to use this one for research or Economy....

Anyway, I am happy either way. I currently like the changes which remove it and will be happy if it changes again.

You folks who want the wheel fail to realize that it was never intended to stay. This entire thread and all the threads to keep it are moot. Stardock has 'put it back in' and will actually re incorporate it back in 1.5.

Personally, as someone who has used it since Alpha, I find the game far more fluid and enjoyable without it.

I was one who used it to crush the ai and with it in game it was very easy to do. I challenge all of you 'wheel lovers' to play an entire game WITHOUT it and see if you can beat the ai as easy as you can with the wheel. Step up to Gifted or Genius and note that you can no longer zip WAY ahead of the ai in production or research or money. All three have to be planned out especially when settling a planet. You have to decide am i going to use this one for research or Economy....

Anyway, I am happy either way. I currently like the changes which remove it and will be happy if it changes again.

I am posting simply to point out that the changes can be good.

Larse you fail to realize another point: no one care about beating AI. when people vote for wheel - the very very last thing in their mind - is that it can be used to beat AI. who cares???? personally i do not play single at all and after recent patch can not even stomach multiplayer. main point is that developers taken away the ability to freely manage planets in the game! poor old master of orion have more options to manage planets than Galactic Civilisation at the moment.

and after all with wheel AI have much bigger advantage to human players because AI can micro much better than any human player on turn to turn bases.

to summarize: your point that wheel used to beat AI is complete nonsense.

Larse you fail to realize another point: no one care about beating AI. when people vote for wheel - the very very last thing in their mind - is that it can be used to beat AI. who cares???? personally i do not play single at all and after recent patch can not even stomach multiplayer. main point is that developers taken away the ability to freely control their planet! and after all with wheel AI have much bigger advantage to human players because AI can micro much better than any human player on turn to turn bases.

to summarize: your point that wheel used to beat AI is complete nonsense.

Really? That makes no sense. If having better control through the wheel is not to ultimately beat the AI, then what is the point of playing the game? What other reason can there possibility be of having the wheel other than better fine-tuning of your Empire to beat the game, which is beating the AI?

People don`t want the wheel just to sit there and play with it to no conclusion. That`s completely illogical. You are the one talking nonsense, I`m afraid.

You folks who want the wheel fail to realize that it was never intended to stay. This entire thread and all the threads to keep it are moot. Stardock has 'put it back in' and will actually re incorporate it back in 1.5.

Personally, as someone who has used it since Alpha, I find the game far more fluid and enjoyable without it.

I was one who used it to crush the ai and with it in game it was very easy to do. I challenge all of you 'wheel lovers' to play an entire game WITHOUT it and see if you can beat the ai as easy as you can with the wheel. Step up to Gifted or Genius and note that you can no longer zip WAY ahead of the ai in production or research or money. All three have to be planned out especially when settling a planet. You have to decide am i going to use this one for research or Economy....

Anyway, I am happy either way. I currently like the changes which remove it and will be happy if it changes again.

I am posting simply to point out that the changes can be good.

I play almost exclusively on Godlike, with the only step down being to Incredible. If I am playing on Gifted or Genius, I can still zip way ahead of the AI in production and research without touching the wheel, which is the reason why I never play on lower difficulties to begin with. If you are complaining about the game being too easy while playing normal or Gifted, you need to step up your game to higher difficulties. On Godlike, even with micromanaging the wheel, the AI will still have a very good chance of crushing you if your neighbor just happens to be an aggressive faction with the opposite ideology.

Planning how to set up a planet is something everyone should have been doing. It is far more efficient to specialize than to make every planet try to do everything. It is the same way in the real world. A business is not ran by everyone doing everything, even if they could do it. It is ran by groups of specialized employees working together, such as financing, advertising, legal, etc. You would only be handicapping yourself by intentionally making balanced planets.

And of course, planning how to set up the planets while taking into account future terraforming takes up vastly more time than managing the wheel ever will.

Larse you fail to realize another point: no one care about beating AI. when people vote for wheel - the very very last thing in their mind - is that it can be used to beat AI. who cares???? personally i do not play single at all and after recent patch can not even stomach multiplayer. main point is that developers taken away the ability to freely control their planet! and after all with wheel AI have much bigger advantage to human players because AI can micro much better than any human player on turn to turn bases.

to summarize: your point that wheel used to beat AI is complete nonsense.

Really? That makes no sense. If having better control through the wheel is not to ultimately beat the AI, then what is the point of playing the game? What other reason can there possibility be of having the wheel other than better fine-tuning of your Empire to beat the game, which is beating the AI?

People don`t want the wheel just to sit there and play with it to no conclusion. That`s completely illogical. You are the one talking nonsense, I`m afraid.

i'll explain again: reason to play the game is to have fun, to entertain, often with friends. not just to beat AI..it's primitive approach.

entertainment comes only with freedom of choice. having limited, or no freedom - leave person frustrated.

having wheel is having a freedom of choice, freedom to manage your planets. freedom was taken away.

and again the wheel DOES NOT GIVE human advantage over AI!!! AI can micro much better than any human on turn to turn bases.

and now аbout your and not only your recent post in general:

what a typical selfish approach........ but I can reassure you you are not alone. there a whole bunch of guys like you.

you do not like something, you do not use it. it's ok.

but this is NOT ENOUGH for you. you want to make sure that other people do not use that "something" too, on the grounds that you personally do not like it.

you want it gone because you do not like it. who cares about people with different opinion ... yeah?

our response - you do not like it? - do not use it. as simple as that.

but let others do what they like.

and again main reason for wheel removal - is super specialized planets, not micromanagement. lot of people agree that wheel removal made micromanagement worse.

overspecialized planets problem can be sorted using different approach. no need for wheel removal.#

to summarize: personally my approach to this argument different: i vote for option of keeping both planet control systems: new tick box system and old wheel. let everybody use what the like.

I am just curious? I obviously dont micro anywhere near as good as you or some others do so I am just asking.

To be honest? No. Only, I have not tried yet, and that is because even with the wheel, it takes a lot of luck, close calls, and/or specific strategies to beat the AI. By specific strategies I mean go neutral ideology or use the Ancient ability on a custom race to see the starting positions of the other factions. I like to play Benevolent, so races like the Yor, Drengin, and Krynn (and now the Snathi too) are always declaring war on me pretty early on. If one or more of them happen to be my neighbors too, then I am in for a rough time (or screwed entirely). The size of the map only buys you more or less time, but the largest and smallest maps do make things easier. For example, Ancient Trait + Tiny Map + Military focus means you can invade the home worlds of all your enemies early on before they get too strong. Since I do not like to limit my play options to specific patterns to beat the AI, though, I tend to rough it out on gigantic to immense maps.

But like I said, there is really not much micromanaging to be done. Overall, I would say that the key to good use of the wheel is simply knowing how much Manufacturing points you need to build each improvement in one turn. You do not need to micromanage every turn. Just set your production wheel to produce enough Social Manufacturing to one turn build the most expensive improvement on your queue, and then leave your planet alone until everything is done. The increase in production as a result of improvements being build out and population growth is not significant enough to justify checking back every turn. Once you know how much things cost, it takes no time at all to set your wheel. You do not even need to be perfect.

The same can be applied to research as well, but at least with research, any excess can be put toward the next tech in the tree. Planning your planets relative to their bonuses, tiles, and location well is an equally large factor.

you are absolutely right. it take as much time to click on the wheel as it takes to click on one of tick boxes. everybody who argues that wheel is time consuming- talking nonsense! and just playing fools! the wheel is too powerful is true but this issue can be easily sorted. there are a lot of way to sort it out with out need of removing it. one of the ways suggested by frogman - adding cohesion. another - just changing the way base points calculated. i have suggested one of the possible ways how it can be done few posts before.

You're missing the point completely. It has nothing to do with the number of clicks or amount of time needed to make a change. That's not even remotely the point.

What the wheel does is, if you want to maximize a world's potential - in particular a non-manufacturing world - it requires your occasional attention. On a single planet, no big deal. The big problem is many worlds requires attention at the same time. Unlocking technology becomes an exercise in "here we go again" because every singe time I need to upgrade my worlds, I have to fiddle with the slider on every. single. one. (excluding pure manufacturing, of course) Then I have to go back and set the sliders back to where they were before, only this time it's different for every world. THUS, I must go through my planets every (or nearly every) turn to make sure I'm not letting one slack off once the upgrades are finished. Taking away the wheel takes away that chore. That is why I didn't like the wheel. The wheel itself was never the problem, the problem was how the wheel influenced gameplay and mechanics in even a mid-sized empire with specialized worlds (which the game very much encourages)

Was it ever considered to keep the planetary wheel (for everybody), just make it less grunty? ie Make it totally impossible to, as frogboy mentions, churn out massive hull ships in one turn (which does sound ridiculously overpowered unless you decide a turn is worth a quarter of a year at least - OT but did we ever get an official definition of how long a turn is?)

Obviously this is moot pretty much, just wondering.

It reads to me like some on here started using the planetary wheel then got overwhelmed by the number of options, the "if I do this for one turn, then next turn go two to the left one up ...." math then two hours later you're still on the same turn...

So on the one hand And you want to do this because you figured out the math and you want to see if you've got it sussed!But on the other you're getting very tired and very bored with all these damn planets and wheels!

you are absolutely right. it take as much time to click on the wheel as it takes to click on one of tick boxes. everybody who argues that wheel is time consuming- talking nonsense! and just playing fools! the wheel is too powerful is true but this issue can be easily sorted. there are a lot of way to sort it out with out need of removing it. one of the ways suggested by frogman - adding cohesion. another - just changing the way base points calculated. i have suggested one of the possible ways how it can be done few posts before.

You're missing the point completely. It has nothing to do with the number of clicks or amount of time needed to make a change. That's not even remotely the point.

What the wheel does is, if you want to maximize a world's potential - in particular a non-manufacturing world - it requires your occasional attention. On a single planet, no big deal. The big problem is many worlds requires attention at the same time. Unlocking technology becomes an exercise in "here we go again" because every singe time I need to upgrade my worlds, I have to fiddle with the slider on every. single. one. (excluding pure manufacturing, of course) Then I have to go back and set the sliders back to where they were before, only this time it's different for every world. THUS, I must go through my planets every (or nearly every) turn to make sure I'm not letting one slack off once the upgrades are finished. Taking away the wheel takes away that chore. That is why I didn't like the wheel. The wheel itself was never the problem, the problem was how the wheel influenced gameplay and mechanics in even a mid-sized empire with specialized worlds (which the game very much encourages)

ok. ones again- you do not like it? don't use it! it's OK. just do not use it. let others do what they want.

that's why I personally vote for keeping both systems to make everybody "happy bunny".

but NO! here we can see again the same selfish approach in form of: "I personally do not like it so I have to make sure no one using it. "

and now back to micro problem. tell me what is different now? let's assume u need to speed up research.

what do you do? you going through every planet shifting it's planetary focus. using those tick boxes now.

what is different now?

I can tell you what is different now: a whole bunch of other micro problems which appeared with social/military slider and wheel removal: one of them need to go through ship construction bases and every other turn to switch on/switch off them.

Not sure why people are still getting their panties in a twist when it is now an OPTION. I can`t be arsed to continue arguing the logic with some of you since the problem is cured anyway. It`s just a waste of energy now.

Perhaps the best compromise would be/would have been to keep the wheel but limit what it can do for an individual colony. Instead of max 100%, min 0%, use the focus values of max 50%, min 25%. This might leave some people unhappy, but those values (having min/max that isn't 0/100) are really what has made the most difference in gameplay - more so than the removal of the wheel.

Given the ranting and raving this has caused, One can only tremble in fear at the melt-down that's going to occur when Stardock announce that they've dealt with the OP sensorship by allowing it to be shot down by any ship (whichever size, whatever weapons) in any part of the galaxy at any time.

I've been playing this game awhile. I had to take a long study break for my CPA exam on the order of months.

I come back after the hiatus and find out that the way I play the game has been totally altered. I spent a good amount of time learning how to play and optimize my play-style, and all I really wanted to do was fire up my game and play. Instead, I come back to all this talk about adding other massive changes.

I cannot express how vexxing this is. Yeah, I could probably put in the effort to figure out the new stuff, but yannow, Fallout 4 is out. I suddenly feel much more incentivized to learn a new system than relearn an old one. If this were a beta or an alpha, I might have a higher tolerance, but large scale alterations of core systems after launch is grating. I already feel as if the industry in general is treating me as a beta tester, and this type of thing doesn't help in the slightest.

Now that's out of my system...

Brad was saying some things that don't jive for me at all.

Firstly, I can't really equate wealth generation with taxes in my head, particularly when you're doing so with the likes of planetary improvements like stock markets and banking systems. If you have your wealth production at 30%, and you increase it to 60%, the increase of wealth doesn't happen because you're suddenly taxing people at 60% vs your previous 30%. Your increase in wealth comes because you're putting that extra 30% of economic production into investments, and generating wealth off the ROI, and then taxing that interest at a flat rate. (GC2 gave you the ability to change that rate.) So if I move my production to 100%, I'm not taxing the people at 100%. I am investing all of my resources into the financial system or commerce and my tax revenue increases because of the increased economic output.

The 'wealth production = taxes' model further falls apart when you consider that if you set your wealth production at 100%, you would effectively have citizens sitting around all day just being taxed. Where does the money to tax come from? This breaks my suspension of disbelief, because if it were the case, I'd stick all those poor bastards in labs or factories, and just take all of their wages, taking an effective 100% tax rate with 100% manufacturing bonus. Obviously the game doesn't allow this.

TLDR: It seems very much to me that he's conflating wealth generation with tax rates.

Secondly, I have problems with the assumptions that form the basis of the coercion system.

So, I live in Austin, Texas. We're a tech town. If Austin were a planet, we might look something like 50% Tech, 30% manufacturing, 20% wealth production.

No one's forcing the workers here into tech. The abundance of tech jobs exist because the powers that be have made substantial investment into infrastructure that supports tech. In much the same way, no one was forcing people to work in car factories in Detroit. Detroit was a manufacturing town because investments had been made in infrastructure, and manufacturing jobs were available.

As such, it seems alien to me to naturally assume that when you mess with your sliders, you're 'forcing' people into jobs. We don't have people here getting irate because they want to be financial analysts but are being forced to work in a lab. In other words, it's encourage the sort of economic activity you want using a carrot, not a whip.

In fact, it gets a little weirder when you consider that all the governments in GalCiv are effectively either socialist nature. You, the leader of the empire, are deciding what infrastructure goes where and what resources are being allocated to what purpose. By adding the coercion element to the game, you're effectively punishing the leader for doing anything. If you were to follow this logic through, you might as well put in an option that takes away the player's ability to decide which planetary improvements get laid down, because that sort of thing would be decided by the free market absent government intervention.

But, Ziddim, if you were living in Austin and didn't like doing tech (50%) and all the jobs in manufacturing and wealth (30% each), you could look on-line/off-line for a job doing what you wanted in, say, Phoenix and move there.

In GalCiv games, there is no volontary emigration. It's controlled by the "government": A Hey, you! On to that thar Colony Ship and go colonize that new planet and probably end up doing the same job you were doing here! or B: Hey, you! On to that thar Transport Ship and, if you don't die, you'll probably end up doing the same job you were doing here! Also, there's no welfare so it's Job A or Job B or Job C (if the government that controls your people wants your colony to create Job B and Job C).

I don't know if Frogboy mentioned this in his piece about the wheel and coercion, but for me that's the rub: You can't get pissed of with the options and leave Zargibarg IV, which is 100% Tech, so guess what, homeboy? Go down to that lab tomorrow and work. And the next day. And the next day. And....

A way out of this (or to just show the negative impact coercion has) would be to have a random Colony Event: A spaceship containing 1.5b of your population has left your colony. This has affected your production as follows: Manufacturing -10%, Research -7%, Wealth -12%. So, while the idea of coercion is still underpinning every decision, you would have to consider how lowering approval might suddenly lead to x billion of your population commendering/buying/stealing a colony ship and doing a version of The Cartman: Screw You Guys, I'm Going Somewhere Else. Okay, those people may end up being shot down/landing on a lousy planet, but their misery made them leave your shitty colony which has negative impact on your production.

But, Ziddim, if you were living in Austin and didn't like doing tech (50%) and all the jobs in manufacturing and wealth (30% each), you could look on-line/off-line for a job doing what you wanted in, say, Phoenix and move there.

In GalCiv games, there is no volontary emigration. It's controlled by the "government": A Hey, you! On to that thar Colony Ship and go colonize that new planet and probably end up doing the same job you were doing here! or B: Hey, you! On to that thar Transport Ship and, if you don't die, you'll probably end up doing the same job you were doing here! Also, there's no welfare so it's Job A or Job B or Job C (if the government that controls your people wants your colony to create Job B and Job C).

That's because the game doesn't model immigration or morale in that way.

I don't know if Frogboy mentioned this in his piece about the wheel and coercion, but for me that's the rub: You can't get pissed of with the options and leave Zargibarg IV, which is 100% Tech, so guess what, homeboy? Go down to that lab tomorrow and work. And the next day. And the next day. And....

Again, you can't do this because the game doesn't model it in this sort of detail.

Furthermore, there is obviously some level of assumed interplanetary interaction occurring. You have things like tourism bonuses and such, but you never see the incoming/outgoing private spacecraft. You are left to assume that there are interplanetary interactions happening that are not modeled in the game. Baseline immigration is one of these un-modeled assumptions.

And for good reason. The numbers involved are *billions* of people. In real world countries with populations in the billions, your migration winds up being 1 or 2 million give or take every *year*. That will come out to hundreds of thousands per month, and thousands per week. The game itself measures time in weeks, and measures in fractions of billions, which winds up practically speaking as millions. These sorts of levels just aren't material enough to dedicate time and processing power to, particularly when the large portion of that immigration is probably not going to take place between empires, and your overall numbers are likely to stay fairly static.

In summary, if you had a subsystem in place that modeled immigration, then yea, sure. Model moral and immigration, and if you ban immigration put coercion into play. But you don't. The game ain't built that way.

There is literally nothing you can do in this game that is *not* coercive. If you were to follow coercion logic to it's natural conclusion in the current setup, there would be literally no action that you could take that doesn't inflict a coercion penalty. This means that you get penalized for any decision that you make, except for making no decision, which would lose you the game as it stands right now.

The benefits of taking these actions doesn't change... If you invest in manufacturing, you're left with the same bonuses that you currently get, but with the coercion system in place, you now take a penalty for it. I don't see the need to take further punishment than the opportunity cost that's built in to the system currently. It's needlessly punishing the player.

If you're dead set on modeling this in the current system, why not just build this level of baseline discontent into your morale bonus instead of adding needless layer of complexity that's not really supported by the core system as it stands?

Natural reproduction is far too slow to cover the population growth rates of planets as seen within the game if the planetary populations are actually reasonably close to the populations given for the planets. The base population growth rate is 0.1 population units per turn, with 1 population unit representing a billion people and 1 turn representing a week. Even if you were to assume an average annual population growth of 10%, you're looking at a base population on planet of about 50 billion before natural population growth can cover the base population growth rate without immigration. Reduce either the current population or the assumed average annual population growth rate to something more reasonable, and you're looking at a population growth rate that can only represent a massive influx of immigrants from somewhere (where exactly is difficult to say; even if you assume an average annual population growth rate of 10% throughout the empire and allow internal migration, you need about 50 units of population to exist somewhere within your empire for every 0.1 new units of population gained each turn, and you simply do not have this much early on and possibly not even late in the game).

The population growth rate makes far more sense if you assume that there is an enormous invisible background population and the population numbers you see indicate how many citizens of your empire, government employees, or even just members of the military (active-duty and perhaps reserve) are present on each planet; then the population growth rate can be assumed to be some kind of limit on the rate at which the paperwork can be filled out to register a citizen or train a person for a government job or military service.

Think about it - off of just your homeworld and your first colony, your empire's population can more or less double in the space of a single in-game year (52 turns; at base population growth rate that's an additional 10.4 population assuming you settled your first colony on the starting turn, and you only started with 10 population on the homeworld and 2.5 on the starting colony ship, and these are productive members of society, not just infants), without you putting any special emphasis on population growth. On top of that, the entire planetary population is sufficiently well prepared to serve as an invasion force that it takes only a single turn to ready an invasion army (and a conquered planet's population is initially equal to the number of invading troops which survived the invasion), and the planet can be defended by a reasonable fraction of its population even with 0 turns of warning of an oncoming invasion force. This somewhat strongly suggests that the population numbers really reflect the number of (probably active-duty) military personnel on the planet rather than more broadly government employees, the empire's citizenry, or the actual planetary population.

Next, consider what the rush-production mechanic implies. Any planet I have can produce an arbitrarily large amount of manufacturing points as long as I have the credits to pay for it, and rush costs are unaffected by the local cost of production as seen by the player (unlike GCII, GCIII has a variable local production cost; a world with a manufacturing multiplier of 2.5 and a wealth multiplier of 1 will pay 1 bc for every 2.5 units of manufacturing while a world with a manufacturing multiplier of 1 and a wealth multiplier of 2.5 will pay 2.5 bc for every unit of manufacturing unless you assume that there's a hidden variable tax rate that for some reason isn't increased when you set the sliders to send money into the treasury but is increased to pay for the apparently obscenely cheap manufacturing at that planet that looks to the player like it generates ~10 manufacturing points for every billion credits of potential income). This suggests that there is a background private manufacturing sector whose production costs are more or less constant across the empire. It's fairly clear that the excess manufacturing cannot reasonably be assumed to be from overtime work at the known infrastructure; you can easily be looking at generating an order of magnitude or two of manufacturing more than your planet can actually produce. It's fairly clear that the excess production cannot always come from elsewhere in the empire, as all of the excess production has to be sourced from somewhere sufficiently nearby to arrive in a single turn and moreover the output of the other worlds of the empire may already be spoken for, and beyond that there's nothing preventing me from rushing production at every single planet and shipyard in my empire if I happen to have the money to do so. It's obvious even to casual inspection that rush costs are unrelated to apparent production costs using public sector infrastructure. Therefore, for all these reasons, rush purchase implies the existence of a private manufacturing sector on at least most if not all planets, and generally a rather significant one at that.

There's also tourism, which even at very low levels and without any multipliers is an industry worth at least a billion or so credits to each planet planet in the empire, so there's almost certainly a fairly significant amount of people moving around within the empire and visiting every colonized planet, though I suppose it's marginally possible that tourism is restricted to a relative handful of hyper-rich who end up spending enough that billions end up being collected by the government.

Also consider the overall GDP of a planet or an empire. A planet can have a wealth multiplier of perhaps 10; assuming a population of 50 and no optional production bonuses, that planet can generate 550 billion credits per turn, or about 28.6 trillion credits per year. That's the government's maximum annual income from that planet (not including tourism). Unless the value of a credit relative to a modern-day US dollar is quite high (something like $1000/credit), that is a piddly amount of income for a population of 50 billion people; a quick search indicates that the US government has an annual revenue of ~$3 trillion, about half of which comes from income taxes, off of just a few hundred million people. It's entirely possible that there are mandatory expenditures (e.g. highway maintenance, social security, wages for all the crewmen on that shiny new superdreadnought, public education funding, etc) which reduce the income generated by a planet before the player ever sees the money, but even making this assumption it's difficult to argue that the visible planetary output actually represents the entire potential output of the planet.

Last, consider that the state-sponsored trade routes have to be trading something, that that something has to be worth the billions of credits per turn that a trade route can generate, and that there is no apparent reduction in the host or destination planet's output (base or otherwise) to cover the production of whatever is being traded or the cost of purchasing whatever is being traded. This suggests, though it does not guarantee, that the goods being traded are being produced and purchased by the abstracted-out private sector rather than the visible public sector (it's also possible that the goods being traded are sufficiently valuable that the government can gain billions of credits from the route despite the production cost of the goods being so low as to have a negligible impact on the host planet's output, or that the goods are sourced from all over the empire and so the impact on any given planet's output is negligible, though given the revenues generated this is somewhat difficult to believe).

The only justifications that Frogboy has offered for the coercion mechanic that make sense are the game balance justifications; the 'realism' justifications fall apart as soon as you take more than the most cursory glance at the game mechanics and start considering what the game mechanics imply about the game universe. Fortunately, the game balance argument is sufficient on its own to justify the inclusion of the proposed coercion mechanic, even if the name of the mechanic makes no sense, and the mechanic should help curb the overproduction issues the game suffers.